THE WHITE GODDESS

A Talk for the Y.M.H.A. Centre, New York, February 9, 1957

Ladies and gentlemen,

I shall tell you frankly how the White Goddess affair started for me, how it continued, and what I really think about it all.

Though a poet by profession, I make my living by writing prose – biographies, historical novels, translations from various languages, critical studies, ordinary novels, and so forth. My home has been in Majorca since 1929. When temporarily exiled because of the Spanish Civil War, I wandered around Europe and the United States; and the World War found me in England, where I stayed until it ended; then I returned to Majorca.

In 1944, at a Devonshire village called Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me. It took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject I knew almost nothing of. I stopped marking across my big Admiralty chart of the Black Sea the course which (according to the mythographers) the Argo had taken from the Bosphorus to Baku and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious ‘Battle of the Trees’, allegedly fought in pre-historic Britain, and my mind worked at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that my pen found it difficult to keep pace with the flow of thought.

The obsession resembled one that overtook Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, the chemist, one day in 1859, when he had a vision of serpents waltzing around, tail to mouth, in a ring. Somehow he knew what they meant; so he sat down, and furiously wrote out his ‘closed ring’ theory of the constituents of benzene. This, fortunately for my argument, is everywhere admitted to be the most brilliant piece of prediction – for though Kekule knew, he had no proof – in the whole range of organic chemistry. ‘Fortunately’, because I can now mention Kekule (who thought he was going crazy) in self justification. If a chemist may be granted a practical vision, why not a poet? Well, within three weeks, I had written a 70,000-word book about the ancient Mediterranean Moon-goddess whom Homer invoked in the Iliad, and whom one of his sons, or (as some prefer to think) one of his daughters, invoked in the Odyssey: and to whom most traditional poets ever since have paid at any rate lip-service.

The other day I came across the manuscript of my book, which has since swelled to four times the original size; and the uncanny excitement that held me throughout those critical weeks flooded back. I had called it The Roebuck in the Thicket, after one of the leading emblems in the Goddess’s cult – a white stag (or roebuck) in Wales, Greece and Ireland, an antelope in Libya; I likened my historical hunt to the chase of that enigmatic beast.

The enlightenment began one morning while I was rereading Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of The Mabinogion, a book of ancient Welsh legends, and came across a hitherto despised minstrel poem called The Song of Taliesin. I suddenly knew (don’t ask me how) that the lines of the poem, which has always been dismissed as deliberate nonsense, formed a series of early mediaeval riddles, and that I knew the answer to them all – although I was neither a Welsh scholar, nor a mediaevalist, and although many of the lines had been deliberately transposed by the author (or his successors) for security reasons.

I knew also (don’t ask me how) that the answer must in some way be linked with an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of a ‘Battle of Trees’ – mentioned in Lady Charlotte Guest’s notes to The Mabinogion – which was occasioned by a lapwing, a dog, and a white roebuck from the other world, and won by a certain god who guessed the name of his divine opponent to be Vron, or ‘Alder’. Nobody had ever tried to explain this nonsense. Further, that both these texts would make sense only in the light of ancient Irish religious and poetic tradition. I am not an Irish scholar, either.

Since there has never been any lunatic streak in my family, I could not believe that I was going crazy. More likely, I was just being inspired. So I decided to check up on the subject with the help of a shelf-ful of learned books on Celtic literature which I found in my father’s library (mainly inherited from my grandfather, an Irish antiquarian) but which I had never read.

To cut a long story short, my answer to the riddle, namely the letter-names of an ancient Druidic alphabet, fitted the not-so-nonsensical Song of Taliesin with almost frightening exactitude; and The Battle of the Trees proved to be a not-so-nonsensical way of describing a struggle between two rival priesthoods in Celtic Britain for control of the national learning. You see, I had found out that the word ‘trees’ means ‘learning’ in all the Celtic languages; and since the alphabet is the basis of all learning, and since (as I remembered from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars) the Druidic alphabet was a jealously guarded secret in Gaul and Britain – indeed, its eighteen letter-names were not divulged for nearly a thousand years – well, the possession of this secret must have been something worth struggling about. I had also found out that the alphabet in Caesar’s day was called the Boibel-Loth, because it began with the letters B.L.; and that as a result of the Battle of the Trees, the Boibel-Loth had displaced an earlier, very similar, and equally secret Celtic alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion, whose eighteen letters were explained as referring to a sequence of forest trees – including the Alder. This sequence, I found, served a dual purpose: as an alphabet and as a sacred calendar – the tree-consonants standing for the months of which their trees were characteristic; the tree-vowels standing for quarterly stations of the Sun, its equinoxes and solstices. It is a calendar which can be proved, by a study of the festal use of trees throughout Europe, to have been observed in the Bronze Age (and earlier) from Palestine to Ireland, and to have been associated everywhere with the worship of the pre-Aryan Triple Moon-goddess – sometimes called Leucothea, the White Goddess.

Then I found that the eighteen-letter Celtic tree-alphabet could, for various reasons, be regarded as a Celtic counterpart of the eighteen-letter Greek Orphic alphabet, associated with moving trees; the Orphic alphabet is known to have preceded the Classical Greek alphabet, the characters of which betray its Phoenician origin. Also, I found that the Triple Moon-goddess Brigit, or Bride, of ancient Ireland and Scotland (patroness of poetry, smithcraft and medicine) whose counterpart in Wales was the powerful Ninefold Muse-goddess Caridwen, could be identified with the Triple (or Ninefold) Muse-goddess of Greece; and again with the Italian Goddess Carmenta (who is said to have invented the Latin alphabet); and with the Nine Scandinavian Norns, who dispensed their runes under the World Tree Yggdrasil. All these cults seemed to have been basically the same.

My conclusions have not been condemned at universities; but then neither have they been approved. Scholars blush and turn their heads away when they are mooted. Of course, this should have been a subject for wide and deep research by university teams of specialists; and to show that I was merely a single, ignorant poet, I did not write in scholarly language, nor even provide an apparatus criticus. But I had at least marked out a new field of investigation, in case any university folk might one day feel inclined to exploit it. All that has happened so far is that dozens of intelligent strangers – students in Celtic literature, in botany, arboriculture, archaeology, anthropology, and so forth, but none of them holding university chairs – have helped me to amend and enlarge the book; and that I have incorporated their findings in the latest edition.

Don’t mistake this for a grievance. Poets neither compete with professional scholars, nor do they solicit sympathy from them. Granted, I seem to have stumbled on the central secret of neolithic and Bronze Age religious faith, which makes sense of many otherwise inexplicable myths and religious customs; but this discovery is not essential to my central theme – namely the persistent survival of this faith among what are loosely called ‘romantic poets’. Their imagery, I have shown, is drawn either consciously or unconsciously from the cult of the White Goddess, and the magic their poems exert largely depends on its closeness to her mysteries.

The most important single fact in the early history of Western religion and sociology was undoubtedly the gradual suppression of the Lunar Mother-goddess’s inspiratory cult, and its supersession not by the perfunctory cult of a Sky-god, the god of illiterate cattle-raising Aryan immigrants, but by the busy, rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet – the familiar ABC – and initiated European literature and science. It is no secret that, towards the end of the second millennium BC, Apollo’s people captured the Moon-goddess’s most revered shrines and oracles, including Tempe, Delphi and Delos; and so limited her worship that the great raging Ninefold Mountain-mother of Parnassus was at last converted into a choir, or ballet, or troupe, of nine tame little Nymphs, ‘the Muses’, with Apollo as their art-director and manager. Apollo also triumphed over the Italian Goddesses Minerva and Carmenta, when the Romans went all Greek under the late Republic.

Much the same thing happened elsewhere among other European nations. Early in the sixth century AD, certain muscular Christians from Strathclyde marched south into Wales, and dispossessed the Muse-goddess Caridwen, who had hitherto been served there by highly educated poet-magicians: supplanting these with untrained scalds and hymn-writers. In Ireland, Christianity also triumphed, but only as the result of slow, peaceful penetration, not of war; and the ancient poetic traditions, closely allied with those of the ancient Welsh, survived until mediaeval times outside the English settlements. Brigit, the Goddess of Poetry, who may be the same as the Greek Goddess Brizo of Delos (there were strong cultural connexions between Bronze Age Greece and Ireland) became Christianized as St Bridget, and her ancient fire still burned at Kildare until the reign of King Henry VIII.

This general view led me to differentiate between Muse poetry and Apollonian poetry: written respectively by those who rely on inspiration, checked by commonsense, and those who rely on intellectual verse decorated by the artificial flowers of fancy. Before pursuing this subject, I must make four rather odd disclosures.

Now, I am no mystic: I studiously avoid witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing, and so on. I live a simple, normal, rustic life with my wife, my children, and a wide circle of sane and intelligent friends. I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no philosophical sect; but I do value my historical intuition, which I trust up to the point where it can be factually checked. There’s nothing so strange about that, surely?

Every good businessman in the service of the mercantile god Hermes knows what a ‘hunch’ is, and will always explore its possibilities with statistical care. Moreover, every great mathematic or scientific discovery has begun as pure hunch: substantiated later by careful calculation.

I have told you about the sudden obsession that overcame me at Galmpton. The fact is, while working on my Argonaut book, I found the figure of the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily more powerful, until she dominated the story. Listen to this: I had in my work-room several small brass objects from the Gold Coast – bought from a dealer in London – gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a hump-backed man playing a flute. I also had a small brass box, with a lid, originally used (so the dealer told me) to contain the gold-dust itself. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated on the same box; but I knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid, until ten years later. Then I learned that the humpback represented a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of an Akan State, probably Asante; and that every Akan Queen-mother (there are some still reigning today) claims to be a direct incarnation of the Triple Moon-goddess Ngame. The design on the box-lid is a spiral connected by a single line to the rectangular frame enclosing it – the frame having nine teeth on either side – and means: ‘There is none greater – in the world – than the Triple Goddess Ngame.’ These gold weights and the boxes for containing the gold dust were made before the British conquest of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.

Very well: put it down to coincidence. Deny that there was any connexion at all between the hump-backed herald on the box (proclaiming the magnitude of the Triple Moon-goddess of West Africa and surrounded by brass animals representing Akan clan totems) and myself, who suddenly became obsessed by the White Goddess of Europe, wrote of her clan totems in the Argonaut context, and now had thrust upon me ancient secrets belonging to her cult in Wales, Ireland and elsewhere. Please, believe me: I was wholly unaware that the box celebrated the Goddess Ngame. Or that the Helladic Greeks, including the early Athenians, were racially linked with Ngame’s people – Libyan Berbers, known as the Garamantians, who moved south from the Sahara to the Niger in the eleventh century AD, and there intermarried with negroes. Or that Ngame herself was a Moon-goddess and shared all her attributes with the White Goddess of Greece and Western Europe. I knew only that, according to Herodotus, the Greek Athene was the same goddess as Libyan Neith.

A second disclosure. I completed The White Goddess in 1946, when I returned to Majorca soon after the War, and there wrote more particularly about the Sacred King as the Moon-goddess’s divine victim; holding that every Muse-poet must, in a sense, die for the Goddess whom he adores, just as the King died. Old Georg Schwarz, my next-door neighbour – a German-Jewish antiquary – had meanwhile passed away and bequeathed me five or six more gold weights of the same provenience. These included a small, mummy-like figurine with one large eye. It has now been identified by experts on West African art as the Akan King’s okrafo priest. I had suggested in my book that the King in primitive Mediterranean society was, to begin with, merely the ruling Queen’s handsome young consort, and doomed to be sacrificed at the end of his term. But, by early historical times (to judge from Greek and Latin myths) he had won executive power as the Queen’s representative, or King, and the privilege of sacrificing a substitute. The same governmental change, I have since learned, took place among the matriarchal Akan, after their southern migration. In Bono, Asante, and other states similarly constituted, the King’s victim was called the ‘okrafo priest’. This particular gold weight happened to be early and unique; the famous Danish expert on African native art, Kjersmeier, who has handled ten thousand gold weights, tells me that he never saw another like it. Dismiss it as a coincidence, if you like, that the okrafo figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I was writing about the Goddess’s victims.

A third disclosure. After The White Goddess had been written, a friend in Barcelona, who knew nothing about the book, asked me to choose myself a gem for a seal-ring, from a collection of Roman gems he had bought. Among them I found a stranger – a banded carnelian seal of the Greek Argonaut period – and the design was a royal stag with a moon on its flank, galloping towards a thicket! It is now set in the ring which I am wearing today. Dismiss that as a coincidence, too, if you like.

This reminds me of a cross-examination by Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the celebrated K.C., of a witness in a London murder trial: 

Chains of more than coincidence happen so often in my life that if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, I must call them a habit. Not that I like the word ‘supernatural’; I find these happenings natural enough, however superlatively unscientific. The avowed purpose of science is to banish all lunar superstitions and bask in the pure light of solar reason. Superstitions are magical beliefs which (as the word conveys) survive from some banned faith – being so deeply rooted that to challenge them gives one a most uncomfortable feeling. Usually, the new faith incorporates old superstitions in its religious dogma. I think it is foolish to defy any superstition unless one feels very strongly about either its inconvenience or its irrationality – like a Scottish atheist I knew, who had suffered so much from a rigidly Puritan upbringing that he would strop his razor every morning on the leather-bound family Bible. Myself, I wouldn’t do that for a thousand dollars. Also I hate sitting down thirteen to table. The Church refers this superstition to the Last Supper, as a result of which Judas, the thirteenth guest, hanged himself; but it is far older than that. In fact, it refers to the ancient British calendar-alphabet where the tree of the thirteenth month, the tree of death, with its ragged leaves and corpse-like smell was the Elder – the elder on which, according to British mediaeval legend, Judas hanged himself (though, of course, elders do not grow in Palestine). Nor do I ever fail to bow to the new moon, disregarding the scientific presumption that the moon is merely a dead satellite of Earth; for the moon moves the tides, influences growth, rules the festal calendar of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and possesses other unaccountable magic properties, known to every lover and poet.

Let me get this straight. Mr Randall Jarrell, the American poet accredited this year to the Library of Congress, has generously declared that I write good poems; but holds that what I say about the White Goddess is grotesque nonsense, a personal fantasy of my own. If he had said that my poems were bad, I should not contradict him, because everyone is entitled to his likes and dislikes and, anyway, no poem is absolutely good. Yet I venture to suggest that, despite my superstitions (inherited from an Irish father) and despite my habit of noting more-than-coincidences, Mr Jarrell cannot accuse me of inventing the White Goddess, or any facts about her worship in ancient days. He views me as a triumphant vindication of Freud’s and Jung’s psychological theories; and bases his analysis on Good-bye To All That, an autobiography which I wrote twenty-eight years ago. ‘Few poets have made better pathological sense,’ he reports – adding that my world picture is a projection of my unconscious on the universe.

Well, I shall not repudiate the autobiographical facts of Good-bye To All That; indeed, I am now re-publishing the book. But I should be a triumphant vindication of Freud’s and Jung’s theories only if I did not know exactly what my poems were about – if I had to get them psycho-analysed in order to find out what ailed me. The truth is that I read Freud as long ago as 1917 – critically, too, and found him most unscientific. Freud, indeed, never realized to his dying day that he was projecting a private fantasy on the world, and then making it stick by insisting that his disciples must undergo prolonged psycho-analytic treatment until they surrendered and saw the light. Much the same goes for Jung. My world picture is not a psychological one, nor do I indulge in idle myth-making and award diplomas to my converts. It is enough for me to quote the myths and give them historical sense: tracing a certain ancient faith through its vicissitudes – from when it was paramount, to when it has been driven underground and preserved by witches, travelling minstrels, remote country-folk, and a few secret heretics to the newly established religion. Particularly by the endowed Irish poets and their humble colleagues, the Welsh travelling minstrels – descendants of the poets expelled by the Christian Cymry, and preservers of the pre-Christian Mabinogion myths.

In scientific terms, no god at all can be proved to exist, but only beliefs in gods, and the effects of such beliefs on worshippers. The majority of scientists, however, are God-worshippers, if no more than metaphorically and for social convenience. The concept of a goddess was banned by Christian theologians nearly two thousand years ago, and by Jewish theologians long before that. The universities have naturally followed suit; though I can’t make out why a belief in a Father-god’s authorship of the universe, and its laws, should be considered any more scientific than a belief in the inspiration of this artificial system by a mother-goddess. In fact, granted the first metaphor, the second follows logically. If these are no more than metaphors. At all events, the scientists attached to universities continue to respect their theological colleagues. Protestant Doctors of Divinity in particular, who posit the literal existence of an all-powerful God and regard supernatural happenings (many of them scientifically ill-attested) as a proof of His existence. But they would raise their eyebrows at anyone who posited the literal existence of a goddess. Here they are, I admit, on safe political and sociological ground. Except in a few scattered, semi-civilized tribes, such as those of West Africa and Southern India, the Goddess is everywhere refused official recognition; nor are the times propitious for reviving her worship in a civilized world governed (or mis-governed) almost exclusively by the ambitious male intelligence. So when people write to me, as they often do – not only from what is called the ‘Screwy State’, but also from the hinterland of this highly intellectual Empire State – asking me to help them start an all-American Goddess cult, I reply discouragingly. I beg them not to mistake me for a Joseph Smith junior, a Mary Baker Eddy, or that sort of person.

My task in writing The White Goddess was to provide a grammar of poetic myth for poets, not to plan witches’ Sabbaths, compose litanies and design vestments for a new orgiastic sect, nor yet to preach matriarchy over a radio network. Certainly, I hold that critical notice should be taken of the Goddess, if only because poetry which deeply affects readers – pierces them to the heart, sends shivers down their spine, and makes their scalp crawl – cannot be written by Apollo’s rhetoricians or scientists. Two outstanding scientists of the early nineteenth century – Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the mathematician, and Sir Humphry Davy, the chemist, tried their hands at poetry. Hamilton’s work was ludicrously sentimental; while Davy’s was pompously academic. But I am grateful to Davy for epitomizing the conflict of solar reason and lunar inspiration, in these defiant and egotistical stanzas:

[minds and designs, though, are a rather unacademic rhyme.]

True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity – a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers with its internal magic. Since the source of creative power in poetry is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration – however this may be scientifically accounted for – why not attribute inspiration to the Lunar Muse, the oldest and most convenient European term for the source in question?

Let me be plainer still. It is a commonplace of history that what happens on earth gets reflected in theological dogma. When the Chief Priestess of a matriarchal state has been dethroned by patriarchal invaders, the event becomes recorded in the religious myth – as the Theban Sphinx-goddess is said to have committed suicide on Oedipus’s arrival from Corinth, where a Hittite Sun-cult had taken root; or as Jehovah (according to Isaiah) cut in two with his sword the Sea-serpent Rahab – the ancient Mediterranean Sea-and-Moon-goddess of Palestine whom the Jews banished from Jerusalem. And when a dozen small states, some with patrilinear, some with matrilinear, royal succession, form a federation for mutual convenience, this gets recorded in myth as a heavenly family of gods and goddesses – as happened in Greece during the second millennium BC. We can be pretty sure that the divine feastings which were said to have taken place on Mount Olympus reflected the feastings at Olympia in the Peloponnese – the sacred centre of the Confederation where the various state representatives met under the Zeus-like High King of Mycenae. And if a revolution breaks out within a matrilinear state, such as Athens, and descent is thereafter reckoned through the father, not the mother, the state goddess is said to have been re-born from the Father-god’s head – as happened to Athene at Athens.

The progress of patriarchy in ancient Greece can be gauged by the fortunes of the divine Olympian family. The Achaean Zeus humbled Hera, the Goddess of Argolis, whom he denied all her former powers but that of prophecy; Athene declared that she was ‘All for the Father’; Apollo pushed his twin Artemis into the shade; Heracles was admitted to Heaven despite Hera’s protests; Hestia the Hearth-goddess vacated her seat on the Council in favour of Dionysus; and Aphrodite had become the butt of obscene jokes by the time The Odyssey was written. Only the Fertility-goddess Demeter kept her dignified position, and even she had to employ a male priesthood at the Eleusinian Mysteries, and allow the demi-god Dionysus his part in them – according to legend, the Athenians who tried to keep him out were ignominiously smitten with piles. These events recorded a steady deterioration in the general position of women – they were pushed out of trade, industry, justice, and local government; and the rise of Platonic philosophy, coupled with the homosexual cult, set them back still further.

The divine honours presently given to world conquerors – a field in which no woman could compete – made women (always the outraged victims of this royal sport) seem of less account than ever. At last, military need forced the Roman Emperor Constantine to humour his predominantly Christian legionaries and junior officers and let them march behind the Cross. Thereupon the long discredited Olympians were banished for ever (apart from a brief come-back under the Emperor Julian) and superseded by the all-male Christian Trinity. Women then went down in status still further, since Christianity brought with it the Hebrew myth of Adam’s rib and Eve’s apple; and they could not even point to Sappho’s poems and say: ‘Well, at least a woman wrote these!’ – because the Church had been at great pains to hunt out and burn all the copies, on the untenable excuse that Sappho was a Lesbian in more senses than one. But the bottom of the trough had been reached, and women’s social position improved markedly about the eleventh century AD. This change has been attributed to the abolition of slavery and to the continuous wars that followed the break-down of central government in the West; and particularly to the Crusades, which obliged the warrior-princes and nobles to leave their small and independent estates in the hands of their ladies while they were away. The ladies had to keep accounts, buy and sell, see that the fields were sown and the crops fetched in, watch the work of the castle artisans, manage the brewing, weaving, and other necessary crafts, educate the children, learn to be physicians and surgeons. In earlier days, these matters would have been attended to by a trusty slave or freedman.

It was in this period (now called the Age of Chivalry) that Romantic poetry began, nourished on the ancient Arthurian myths of Wales and Brittany. King Arthur’s legend is partly historical, partly derived from the pre-Christian myth of the sacrificed King who is taken to the Apple-tree Fairyland by the White Goddess Morgan la Fée. Normans carried the Arthur legend to countries as distant as Scotland, Majorca and Sicily – since when the locals have claimed that King Arthur lies concealed under this hill or that in their own territory, waiting for his eventual resurrection. At the same time, the Virgin Mary, hitherto a dim figure – but for the few heretical sects of the Middle East who had secretly identified her with the dethroned Goddess – suddenly rose in theological esteem. She would have risen still further but for the check she received in certain vigorous male-minded Protestant regions, such as Southern and Eastern England (where the hatred of Mariolatry was a leading cause of the Roundhead Revolution), Eastern Germany, parts of the Low Countries, and New England. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has given the Virgin many of the attributes that belonged to the ancient Triple Moon-goddess; and she can now legitimately be saluted as ‘the Queen of Heaven’ – the very title borne by Rahab (the Goddess Astarte), against whom the prophet Jeremiah declaimed in the name of his monotheistic Father-god Jehovah.

While the present technological civilization, which is largely of Protestant impulse, maintains itself, with men holding the key positions in industry, law, trade, medicine, science, and government, the Virgin cannot rise beyond the rank conceded her. But if this system collapses – or if, instead, it reaches the stage of perfect nuclear automation, in which men do not need to work so hard as now to provide and distribute the necessities of life – then social changes may well follow: changes that will obviously be reflected in religious dogma. The new Heaven may house two gods and a goddess; or even, as in pre-Christian Rome, pre-Exilic Jerusalem, and pre-Roman Carthage, two goddesses, one of intuition, one of fertility, aided by a technological male god of the Vulcan type.

I offer this merely as speculation. Yet the growing popularity of Muse-poets (as opposed to Apollonian poets who glorify male intelligence, male courage, male energy) and the growing mistrust of orthodox Christian dogma among the educated classes throughout the Western World, suggest that such a religious revolution may already be brewing. Meanwhile, in all Christian Churches, the Virgin is allowed no female characteristics which might threaten male supremacy; she is merciful, gentle, pure, patient, obedient – making no parade of wisdom and promoted to motherhood without having loved in ordinary female fashion. If wise, she modestly hides her wisdom, and though her bodily Assumption to Heaven is now dogma at Rome, she has no priestesses to perform her mysteries, but only priests of the triune male God. The Welsh minstrels dared, at one period, to identify the Virgin with their pagan Muse-goddess Caridwen; but this heresy could come to nothing, because Caridwen had been very far from being a nun. In fact, the White Goddess has never been monogamic and has never shown pity for the bad, the ineffective, the sterile, the perverted, the violent, or the diseased: though loving and just, she is ruthless. Her symbol is the double-axe – consisting of two moon-like blades, one crescent, one decrescent, set back to back and fitted with a haft. The crescent blade represents blessing, increase, joy; the decrescent blade represents cursing, plague and sorrow that punish human folly and disorder. The Muse-poets have always recognized these two blades: poetry proper is the constructive side of their profession, satire the destructive side.

Mr Jarrell accuses me of a sort of schizophrenia in thinking so highly of women and cheerfully accepting the more disagreeable side of their nature, although, as he points out, I have been, in my day, a boxer, a full-back at football, and a fighting soldier. But is that so strange? Was it not the code of mediaeval chivalry, which the troubadour poets extolled in the Virgin’s name, to be a parfit gentle knight: a lion in battle, a lamb in the bower, however cruel one’s mistress? Have British soldiers fought less gloriously when they served under a queen rather than a king – Elizabeth, Anne, Victoria? It is a complete fallacy that the toughest fighter is the cave-man who knocks his women about. The most miraculous victory against odds in Classical times was won by the Epizephyrian Locrians of Calabria against their neighbours of Croton; and these Locrians were then the only people in Europe who still had a matrilineal constitution, with the women politically in the ascendant and a supreme Moon-goddess their sole deity.

I am aware that the Protestant dogma reflects well enough the sociological set-up of, say, the United States Bible Belt, non-conformist Britain, and the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland and South Africa. Most of the devout Christian women in those Churches are perfectly content with their social position, and therefore with the Virgin Mary as a representative of womankind. They look up to their husbands, give in to them, take motherhood seriously, do not consider themselves the equal (let alone the superiors) of man, restrain their wayward passions, support good causes, neglect their own looks, and do not grudge men their monopoly of the priesthood. They sometimes even take a masochistic delight in being ill-treated, abused and betrayed by extravagantly swaggering he-men, while they pinch and scrape. They are not to be either praised or pitied – that’s how they come. But they cannot appreciate Muse-poetry. For them the Apollonian poet, even the fraudulent rhetorician, or the prosy hymn-writer, suffices. Yet it is a question how far Chaucer’s ‘Patient Griselda’, or Bunyan’s Christiana, or David Copperfield’s wife Agnes, are the results of domestic conditioning; whether they differ in circumstance, rather than in nature, from the numerous predatory women of our own day, born in unhappy homes and soured by the patriarchal system, who enjoy breaking up insecure marriages and making a living from male weakness and credulity.

Some of you are looking queerly at me. Do I think that poets are literally inspired by the White Goddess? That is an improper question. What would you think, should I ask you if, in your opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued; let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess. All we can know for sure is that the Ten Commandments, said to have been promulgated by Moses in the name of a Solar God, still carry religious force for those hereditarily prone to accept them; and that scores of poems written in the Muse-tradition still carry the authentic moon-magic for those hereditarily prone to accept that. Apostles of Solar Reason ‘scorning the lunar ray’ may reject such poems as idle or nonsensical; but respectable anthropologists (and anthropologists are scientists) now give de facto if not de jure recognition to all sorts of crazy deities, male and female – such as the Voodoo deities of Haiti (some of African origin; others renegade Catholic saints) – whose invocation causes ecstatic behaviour in their worshippers and produces if not miraculous, at least inexplicable, phenomena.

By ancient religious theory the White Goddess becomes incarnate in her human representative – a priestess, a prophetess, a queen-mother. No Muse-poet can grow conscious of the Muse except by experience of some woman in whom the Muse-power is to some degree or other resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his function properly unless under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. (Under a republic he tends to turn seedy and philosophical.) A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse. In many cases the power of absolutely falling in love soon vanishes; if only because the woman takes no trouble to preserve whatever glory she gets from the knowledge of her beauty and the power she exercises over her poet-lover. She grows embarrassed by this glory, repudiates it, and ends up either as a housewife or a tramp; he, in disillusion, turns to Apollo who, at any rate, can provide him with a livelihood and intelligent entertainment – and goes out of circulation before his middle twenties. But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet makes a distinction between the Goddess as revealed in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman in whom the Goddess may take up residence for a month, a year, seven years, or even longer. The Goddess abides; and it may be that he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman.

Mr Jarrell, having read my autobiography, concludes that when the woman in whom the Goddess was once resident for me abdicated, I identified myself for all intents and purposes with the Goddess. He writes, very naughtily: ‘There is only one Goddess, and Graves is her prophet, and isn’t the prophet of the White Goddess the nearest thing to the White Goddess?’

I flatly deny that, even though Mr Jarrell claims to have found general confirmation of his theory ‘in Volume Seven of Jung’s Collected Works – the second part of the essay entitled “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”.’ No, my autobiography was written nearly thirty years ago, and much has happened to me since, as he might well have deduced from my later poems. Being in love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of woman’s nature – the decrescent axe-head – and many Muse-poems are written in helpless recognition of this by men whose love is no longer returned.

*

It will be noticed that the Elizabethan poet who makes this pilgrimage to Mary the Egyptian at Walsinghame, the mediaeval patron saint of lovers, has loved one woman all his life, and is now old. Why is she not old, too? Because he is describing the Goddess, not the individual woman. The same is true of Wyatt’s:

It is not ‘She flees from me’, but ‘They flee from me’: namely the women who were in turn illumined for Wyatt by the lunar ray that commanded his love – beginning with Anne Boleyn, later Henry VIII’s unfortunate queen.

I hesitate to delve into Mr Jarrell’s emotional biography as a means of discovering how far he regards romantic falling-in-love as a grotesque pathological event. But I cannot think the act unmanly, or discreditable, far less grotesque. Nor am I a prophet of the Goddess. A prophet is, by definition, one who speaks in the name of a deity, like Moses or John the Baptist, or Mohammed, with: ‘Thus saith the Lord!’ No man can decently speak in a woman’s name. The Pythian Priestess at Delphi did not give clever, ambiguous, political answers to her visitants (instead of genuine oracles) until Apollo captured the Goddess Gaia’s oracular stool and installed his own docile nominees. To acknowledge the Goddess’s power is a very different matter from saying in a ringing baritone: ‘Thus saith the Goddess!’ A simple loving declaration: ‘There is none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess!’ has been made by every Muse-poet in the English language (and by countless others, down the centuries, in various European, African and Asian idioms); though the Goddess is sometimes, of course, given such cautiously abstract titles as ‘Nature’, ‘Truth’, ‘Beauty’, or ‘Poetry’. Myself I think it most unlikely that this grotesque habit will end for a few centuries yet.

*

You think perhaps that I am holding out on you by not trying to account for the hauntings? But surely it is enough to record what there is no logical means of evaluating? When a simple citizen, who is neither very good, very wicked, nor very anything else, is struck dead by lightning while running for shelter to the Subway, and is the only victim of the storm, what do people call that? They call it an act of God: meaning that it was a blind accident. Well, in that case, what should you call a more-than-coincidence of the sort I have described?

This brings me to my fourth disclosure. I offered The White Goddess in turn to the only publishers I knew who claimed to be personally concerned with poetry and mythology.

The first regretted that he could not recommend this unusual book to his partners, because of the expense. He died of heart failure within the month.

The second wrote very discourteously, to the effect that he could not make either head or tail of the book, and could not believe it would interest anyone. He died too, soon afterwards.

But the third, who was T. S. Eliot, wrote that it must be published at all costs. So he did publish it, and not only got his money back, but pretty soon was rewarded with the Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a smash hit on Broadway.

Very well, call these coincidences. But I beg you not to laugh yet! Wait! I beg you not to laugh, unless you can explain just why the second publisher should have dressed himself up in a woman’s panties and bra one afternoon, and hanged himself from a tree in his garden. (Unfortunately, the brief report in Time did not specify the sort of tree.)

Was that a blind act of God, or was it a calculated act of Goddess? I leave  the answer to you; all I know is that it seemed to me natural enough in its horrid way.

I must end this talk which, I hope, answers more questions than it raises, by driving home my main point. A poem which is moon-magical enough to walk off the page – if you know what I mean – and to keep on walking, and to get under people’s skins and into their eyes and throats and hearts and marrows: that is more-than-coincidence at its most miraculous. And Solar Apollo, for all his new thinking-machines and rhyming dictionaries and analytic courses in poetry-writing, can’t begin to imitate it.